Background Image

...

Any Kind Of Creative Activity Is Likely To Be Stressful. The More Anxiety, The More You Feel That You Are Headed In The Right Direction. Easiness, Relaxation, Comfort - These Are Not Conditions That Usually Accompany Serious Work.

-Joyce Carol Oates

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

Any Kind Of Creative

Joyce Carol Oates

...

Any Kind Of Creative Activity Is Likely To Be Stressful. The More Anxiety, The More You Feel That You Are Headed In The Right Direction. Easiness, Relaxation, Comfort - These Are Not Conditions That Usually Accompany Serious Work.

Views: 8

Topic

More From Joyce Carol Oates

I Wrote A Novel Called "blonde," Which Is About Norma Jean Baker, Who Becomes Marilyn Monroe, Which I Called A Fictitious Biography. That Uses The Material As If It Were Myth - That Marilyn Monroe Is Like This Mythical Figure In Our Culture.

We Are Stimulated To Emotional Response, Not By Works That Confirm Our Sense Of The World, But By Works That Challenge It.

Art Is A Means Of Memorialization Of The Past, A Record Of A Rapidly Vanishing World; A Means Of Exorcising, At Least Temporarily, The Ravages Of Homesickness. To Speak Of 'what Is Past, Or Passing Or To Come'-in The Most Meticulous Language Thereby To Assure Its Permanence; To Honor Those We've Loved And Learned From And Must Outlive.

I Haven't The Faintest Idea What My Royalties Are. I Haven't The Faintest Idea How Many Copies Of Books Sold, Or How Many Books That I've Written. I Could Look These Things Up; I Have No Interest In Them. I Don't Know How Much Money I Have. There Are A Lot Of Things I Just Don't Care About.

Most People Think That A Widow Is Inhabiting Some Elegiac World Of - It's Like Mozart's 'requiem Mass.' You Know, It's Very Beautiful And Elevated Thoughts And Some Measure Of Dignity. I Didn't Have That Experience At All. I Had One Pratfall After Another.

How Lovely This World Is, Really: One Simply Has To Look.

You Don't Have To Understand Why Anything That Has Happened Nor Do You Even Have To Understand What It Is That Has Happened. You Have Only To Live With The Remains.

Keeing Busy" Is The Remedy For All The Ills In America. It's Also The Means By Which The Creative Impulse Is Destroyed.

One Writes To Memorialize, And To Bring To Life Again That Which Has Been Lost.

To Be True To Life, A Novel Must Have An Ending That Is Inevitable Given The Specific Personalities Of The Characters Involved. The Novelist Must Not Impose An Ending Upon Them.

She Thought That This Man Was Her Savior, That He Had Come To Her At A Time In Her Life When Her Life Demanded Completion, An End, A Permanent Fixing Of All That Was Troubled And Shifting And Deadly. And Yet It Was Absurd To Think This. No Person Could Save Another. So She Drew Back From Him And Released Him.

What Is A Family, After All, Except Memories? Haphazard And Precious As The Contents Of A Catch-all Drawer In The Kitchen.

Shakespeare Would Seem To Have Been A Person For Whom The Human Voice/personality In All Its Splendid Idiosyncrasy Was Absolutely Enthralling.

America Is A Very Religious Nation. Not A Mono-religious Nation Because There Are Many Different Strands Of Belief, But There's Something About This Nation That Inspires People, Or Perhaps Draws People, Who Are Strongly Idealistic.

The Act Of Sending A Letter Is An Act Of Generosity, Even If, In Retrospect, It Might Seem Reckless. Why Regret One's Generosity? Why Regret One's Impulsiveness, One's Misjudgment Of Others? The Inevitable Discovery That Someone Is Selling Letters You'd Written In Trust Is Simply To Discover An Obvious Human Truth: There Are Those Who Don't Cherish Us As We'd Cherished Them, And Had Wished To Be Cherished By Them.

Prose-it Might Be Speculated-is Discourse; Poetry Ellipsis. Prose Is Spoken Aloud; Poetry Overheard.

Whoever's Reading This, If Anyone Is Reading It: Does It Matter That Our Old Selves Are Lost To Us As Surely As The Past Is Lost, Or Is It Enough To Know Yes We Lived Then, And We Are Living Now, And The Connection Must Be There? Like A River Hundreds Of Miles Long Exists Both At Its Source And At Its Mouth, Simultaneously?

Every Scar In My Face Is Worth It.

There Is Something Thrilling In The Mimesis Of Life's Surprising Unfolding.

It Would Be Difficult For A Writer Of Realism To Avoid Suggesting A Political/moral Perspective In His Or Her Fiction. "politics" Per Se Is Absent From My Writing But There Is Usually A Moral (if Ironic) Compass.

Writing Allows For Fictitious Voices - The Voices Of Persons Unlike Myself - That Might Otherwise Be Muted.

The Strangeness Of Time. Not In Its Passing, Which Can Seem Infinite, Like A Tunnel Whose End You Can't See, Whose Beginning You've Forgotten, But In The Sudden Realization That Something Finite, Has Passed, And Is Irretrievable.

A Lot Of Widows Feel That They Have Betrayed Their Spouse By Continuing To Live. It's Deranged Thinking. I Know That, But That Doesn't Stop You Feeling It.

Art Does The Same Things Dreams Do. We Have A Hunger For Dreams And Art Fulfills That Hunger. So Much Of Real Life Is A Disappointment. That's Why We Have Art.

As A Child. I Grew Up On A Small Farm, So I Did A Lot Of Drawings Of Animals, Chickens And People. At The Bottom Of Every Page, I'd Put A Strange Scribble. I Was Emulating Adult Handwriting, Though I Didn't Actually Know How To Write.

Often In Gothic Novels There's A Large House, An Estate, And It's Symbolic Of That Culture. Usually It's Sort Of Moldering Or Rotted Or Something, And Sometimes It's A Whole Community.

To Love Life For Some Men Is To Love Fighting, For Fighting, And Not Love, Is Seen As Man's Deepest Passion.

Her Visits To Her Former Hometown Were Infrequent And Often Painful. Pilgrimages Fueled By The Tepid Oxygen Of Family Duty, Unease, Guilt. The More Esther Loved Her Parents, The More Helpless She Felt, As They Aged, To Protect Them From Harm. A Moral Coward, She Kept Her Distance.

I Do What I Want To Do. It Was A Brash Statement Of(her)girlhood. Now She Was An Adult, The Boast Seemed Quaint. For Rarely Do You Know What You Want. Even After You've Done It You Can't Say Clearly If That Was What You'd Wanted Or Just Something That Happened To You, Like Weather.

Writers Are Notoriously Unable To Know About Themselves. Faulkner Thought 'the Fable' Was His Best Novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald Liked 'tender Is The Night,' An Experimental Novel.

Scott Fitzgerald

It Feels Good, Honey, But It Isn't Love.

I Suggest To My Students That They Write Under A Pseudonym For A Week. That Allows Young Men To Write As Women, And Women As Men. It Allows Them A Lot Of Freedom They Don't Have Ordinarily.

You're An Insomniac, You Tell Yourself: There Are Profound Truths Revealed Only To The Insomniac By Night Like Those Phosphorescent Minerals Veined And Glimmering In The Dark But Coarse And Ordinary Otherwise; You Have To Examine Such Minerals In The Absence Of Light To Discover Their Beauty, You Tell Yourself.

When Writing Goes Painfully, When It’s Hideously Difficult, And One Feels Real Despair (ah, The Despair, Silly As It Is, Is Real!)–then Naturally One Ought To Continue With The Work; It Would Be Cowardly To Retreat. But When Writing Goes Smoothly–why Then One Certainly Should Keep On Working, Since It Would Be Stupid To Stop. Consequently One Is Always Writing Or Should Be Writing.

For What Are The Words With Which To Summarize A Lifetime, So Much Crowded Confused Happiness Terminated By Such Stark Slow-motion Pain?

What Is Memory But The Repository Of Things Doomed To Be Forgotten, So You Must Have History. You Must Have Labor To Invent History. Being Faithful To All That Happens To You Of Significance, Recording Days, Dates, Events, Names, Sights Not Relying Merely Upon Memory Which Fades Like A Polaroid Print Where You See The Memory Fading Before Your Eyes Like Time Itself Retreating.

Language Is The Instrument In All Cases And Can Language Be Trusted?if It Were Not For Language, Could We Lie?

Anyone Who Teaches Knows That You Don't Really Experience A Text Until You've Taught It, In Loving Detail, With An Intelligent And Responsive Class.

To Claim - To Claim Repeatedly - That You Are Innocent Of What It Is Claimed By Others That You Have Done, Or Might Have Done, Or Are In Some Quarters Strongly Suspected Of Having Done, Is Never Enough Unless Others, Numerous Others, Will Say It For You.

When I Wrote 'we Were The Mulvaneys,' I Was Just Old Enough To Look Back Upon My Own Family Life And The Lies Of Certain Individuals Close To Me, With The Detachment Of Time. I Wanted To Tell The Truth About Secrets: How Much Pain They Give, Yet How Much Relief, Even Happiness We May Feel When At Last The Motive For Secrecy Has Passed.

I Could Eat Your Heart & Asshole You'd Never Know It.

What Madness! Yet She Would Do It, If She Could Force Herself. She'd Become, She Believed, A Stronger Person: A Willful, Resolute. Like The Man Who Adored Her, Reckless.

If I Try To Summon Back His Face, The Sound Of His Voice, And The Sensation In My Stomach Like A Key Turning In A Lock When He Touched Me, I Lose Everything.

Each Time I Undertake To Reread Virginia Woolf, I Am Somewhat Baffled By The Signature Breathlessness And Relentlessly "poetic" Tone, The Shimmering Impressionism, So Very Different From The Vivid, Precise, Magisterial (and Often Very Funny) Prose Of Her Contemporary James Joyce.

Sometimes I Stumble Upon A Wonderfully Irresistible To Me Voice, Unexpectedly.

When A Marriage Ends, Who Is Left To Understand It?

The Regional Voice Is The Universal Voice.

Like A Flame Is Real Enough, Isn't It, While It's Burning?-even If There's A Time It Goes Out?

I Have Beliefs, Of Course, Like Everyone-but I Don't Always Believe In Them.

I Don't Teach Literature From My Perspective As 'joyce Carol Oates.' I Try To Teach Fiction From The Perspective Of Each Writer. If I'm Teaching A Story By Hemingway, My Endeavor Is To Present The Story That Hemingway Wrote In Its Fullest Realization.

Yet The Fact Had No Consciousness Of Itself Except Through Me.

Nothing Is Accidental In The Universe - This Is One Of My Laws Of Physics - Except The Entire Universe Itself, Which Is Pure Accident, Pure Divinity.

Obviously, There Is Pleasure In The Execution Of Any Sort Of Art, And Using Language, As Nabokov Felt Also, Is An Exquisite Process.

Can Compromise Be An Art? Yes--but A Minor Art.

Critics Sometimes Appear To Be Addressing Themselves To Works Other Than Those I Remember Writing.

We Come Away From The Tragedies Of [william] Shakespeare With A Profound Sense Of Having Encountered Reality In Its Most Pristine Form - Yet The Art-work Is Elaborately Artificial, The Very Genre Of Tragedy In Poetry An Anti-naturalist Perspective.

Long Ago I'd Said That I Am "fascinated By The Phantasmagoria Of Human Personality" - This Is Perhaps Even Truer Now Than Years Ago.

Read Widely, And Without Apology. Read What You Want To Read, Not What Someone Tells You You Should Read.

If A Book I've Committed Myself To Review Turns Out To Be 'disappointing' I Make An Effort To Present It Objectively To The Reader, Including A Good Number Of Excerpts From The Text, So That The Reader Might Form His Or Her Own Opinion Independent Of My Own.

Running! If There's Any Activity Happier, More Exhilarating, More Nourishing To The Imagination, I Can't Think What It Might Be. In Running The Mind Flies With The Body; The Mysterious Efflorescence Of Language Seems To Pulse In The Brain, In Rhythm With Our Feet And The Swinging Of Our Arms.

Prose-it Might Be Speculated-is Discourse; Poetry Ellipsis. Prose Is Spoken Aloud; Poetry Overheard. The One Is Presumably Articulate And Social, A Shared Language, The Voice Of "communication"; The Other Is Private, Allusive, Teasing, Sly, Idiosyncratic As The Spider's Delicate Web, A Kind Of Witchcraft Unfathomable To Ordinary Minds.

It's Not Hard To Write Poorly. But To Write Something Good, It Has To Be Revised.

Novels Usually Evolve Out Of 'character.' Characters Generate Stories, And The Shape Of A Novel Is Entirely Imagined But Should Have An Aesthetic Coherence.

It's Very Hard To Be An Experimental Woman Writer. If I Had Been Writing Under A Pseudonym, Just Initials, I Might Have A Different Reputation - But, Then I Couldn't Be Myself Either.

Self-criticism Is An Art Not Many Are Qualified To Practice.

The Music Was Always In The Background, Like Music At A Church Service; It Was Something To Depend Upon.

Sometimes People Surprise Us. People We Believe We Know.

I Feel Akin To [william] Shakespeare In The Sense That, As I See It, He Lived To Dramatize The Unfailingly Exciting, Unfathomably Strange Interplay Among Human Beings That Constitutes "scenes" In His Plays, And Constitutes "story" In Prose Fiction.

The First Sentence Cant Be Written Until The Final Sentence Is Written.

Sometimes I Read Reviews, And Without Exception I Will Read Critical Essays That Are Sent To Me. The Critical Essays Are Interesting On Their Own Terms.

Writing Is The Most Solitary Of Arts.

It's Always A Challenge To Discover The Most Effective First Sentence, And The Most Effective Final Sentence, In A Chapter For Instance, And In The Book As A Whole.

Henry James's Later Works Would Have Been Better Had He Resisted That Curious Sort Of Self-indulgence, Dictating To A Secretary. The Roaming Garrulousness Of Ordinary Speech Is Usually Corrected When It's Transcribed Into Written Prose.

I Want To Tell You That I Love You I Want To Tell You That I Love You I Want To Tell You That I Love I Love I Love I Love But You Do Not.

Literature, Art, Like Civilization Itself, Are Only Accidents.

The Greatest Realities Are Physical And Economic, All The Subtleties Of Life Come Afterward.

Nothing Comes Of So Many Things, If You Have Patience.

Having Patience

I Love Insult, It's Always Honest.

When You Give Up Struggle, There's A Kind Of Love.

I Would Suggest The Widow Do Things The Husband Used To Do, So He Seems To Be There With You. You Will Feel Like Just Going To Bed. It's So Wonderful, Going To Bed.

It's Where We Go, And What We Do When We Get There, That Tells Us Who We Really Are.

The Folly Of War Is That It Can Have No Natural End Except In The Extinction An Entire People.

Running! If There's Any Activity Happier, More Exhilarating, More Nourishing To The Imagination, I Can't Think Of What It Might Be.

The Danger Of Motherhood. You Relive Your Early Self, Through The Eyes Of Your Mother.

It's Rare That We Actively And Consciously 'forget'; Most Of The Time We Have Simply Forgotten, With No Consciousness Of Having Forgotten. In Individuals, The Phenomenon Is Called 'denial'; In Entire Cultures And Nations, It's Usually Called 'history.

I Had Forgotten That Time Wasn't Fixed Like Concrete But In Fact Was Fluid As Sand, Or Water. I Had Forgotten That Even Misery Can End.

I Turn Down Invitations To Do Things For Money. I Have Almost No Interest In Making Money. Actually, I've Acquired A Fair Amount Of Money That I Will Never Live To Spend. So Earning Money, In A Way, Depresses Me, Because I Feel It's Just Piling Up.

This Was Before Voice Mail, Recorded Phone Messages You Can't Escape. Life Was Easier Then. You Just Didn't Pick Up The Phone.

You Need So Much Energy And Encouragement To Write That If Someone Says Something Negative, Some Of That Energy Goes.

In Love There Are Two Things - Bodies And Words.

The Appeal Of Writing Is Primarily The Investigation Of Mystery.

If You're Living With A Scientist, You See The World Differently Than You Do With A Humanist. It's In Some Ways Very Subtle, The Differences In Perceiving Reality.

Boxing Is An American Sport - A 'so-called Sport' To Many - In Which Images Of Incalculable Beauty And Violence, Desperation And Ingenuity, Are Routinely Entwined; The Sport That Evokes The Most Extreme Reactions - Loathing, Revulsion, Righteous Indigation; A Fierce And Often Inexplicable Loyalty.

The Institution Of Marriage Is Just Formalizing An Emotion, An Attempt To Make It Seem Permanent. The Emotion Will Last Or It Won't Last; Nothing Can Guarantee It.

I Have So Many Favorite Writers, It's Very Hard To Select A Few... Of Classic Writers, I Have Always Admired Emily Dickinson And Henry David Thoreau.

The Brain Is A Muscle Of Busy Hills, The Struggle Of Unthought Things With Things Eternally Thought.

Night Comes To The Desert All At Once, As If Someone Turned Off The Light.

I Believe That Any Form Of Art Is A Species Of Exploration And Transgression. ... Art By Its Nature Is A Transgressive Act, And Artists Must Accept Being Punished For It. The More Original And Unsettling Their Art, The More Devastating The Punishment.

People Who Are Disenfranchised Politically And People Who Are Poor Often Don't Vote. They Often Don't Elect Politicians, So The Politicians Who Are Supporting Them Are Really Being Very Charitable, Because They're Not Going To Give Them Billions Of Dollars In Campaign Funds.

What Does It Mean To Be Born? After We Die, Will It Be The Same Thing As It Was Before We Were Born? Or A Different Kind Of Nothingness? Because There Might Be Knowledge Then. Memory.

I Can Entertain The Proposition That Life Is A Metaphor For Boxing--for One Of Those Bouts That Go On And On, Round Following Round, Jabs, Missed Punches, Clinches, Nothing Determined, Again The Bell And Again And You And Your Opponent So Evenly Matched It's Impossible Not To See That Your Opponent Is You.... Life Is Like Boxing In Many Unsettling Respects. But Boxing Is Only Like Boxing.

The Novel Is Perhaps The Highest Art Form Because It So Closely Resembles Life: It Is About Human Relationships. It's Technique, Page By Page, Resembles Our Technique Of Living Day By Day-a Way Of Relating.

Like All Virtuous People He Imagines He Must Speak The Truth.

After My Parents Passed Away - In 2000 And 2003 - I Felt I Could Take The Time To Think About The Past And Imagine What It Would Have Been Like To Be My Grandmother.

The Television Screen, So Unlike The Movie Screen, Sharply Reduced Human Beings, Revealed Them As Small, Trivial, Flat, In Two Banal Dimensions, Drained Of Color. Wasn't There Something Reassuring About It! -- That Human Beings Were In Fact Merely Images Of A Kind Registered In One Another's Eyes And Brains, Phenomena Composed Of Microscopic Flickering Dots Like Atoms. They Were Atoms -- Nothing More. A Quick Switch Of The Dial And They Disappeared And Who Could Lament The Loss?

Boxing Is A Celebration Of The Lost Religion Of Masculinity All The More Trenchant For Its Being Lost.

I Was Trying Not To Be Happy, Hopeful. I Did Not Believe I Deserved Happiness Or Even Hope, If You Knew My Soul.

There Are Boxers Possessed Of Such Remarkable Intuition, Such Uncanny Prescience, One Would Think They Were Somehow Recalling Their Fights, Not Fighting Them As We Watch.

I Could Never Take The Idea Of Religion Very Seriously.

We Are All Regionalists In Our Origins, However 'universal' Our Themes And Characters, And Without Our Cherished Hometowns And Childhood Landscapes To Nourish Us, We Would Be Like Plants Set In Shallow Soil. Our Souls Must Take Root - Almost Literally.

Better To Be Despised, Then, Than To Be Ignored; Or Damned With Condescending Praise.

Art Is About Freedom Of Expression, And Should Not Be Molded To Fit Any Propaganda Or Lofty Ideal.

A Typical Biography Relying Upon Individuals' Notorious Memories And The Anecdotes They've Invented Contains A High Degree Of Fiction, Yet Is Considered 'nonfiction.'

If My Favorite, Most Comfortable Place Is By Our Fireplace In Cold Weather, Expedient Places Are On An Airplane, In A Waiting Room Or Even Waiting In Line; Frequently These Days, While On The Phone Having Been 'put On Hold.'

I Think Whenever We Think Of Our Hometowns, We Tend To Think Of Very Specific People: With Whom You Rode On The School Bus, Who Was Your Next Door Neighbor You Were Playing With, Who Your Girlfriend Was. It's Always Something Very Specific.

The Despairing Soul Is A Rebel.

I Write So Much Because My Cat Sits On My Lap. She Purrs So I Don't Want To Get Up. She's So Much More Calming Than My Husband.

My Role Models Were Childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, The Brontes.

On The Elusive Gift Of Blending Austerity Of Craft With Elasticity Of Allure.

For What Is Delusion But The Prelude To Hurt. And What Is Hurt But The Prelude To Rage.

There Is An Hour When You Realize: Here Is What You Have Been Given. More Than This, You Won't Receive. And What This Is, What Your Life Has Come To, Will Be Taken From You. In Time.

Only When Men Are Connected To Large, Universal Goals Are They Really Happy-and One Result Of Their Happiness Is A Rush Of Creative Activity.

Novels Begin, Not On The Page, But In Meditation And Day-dreaming - In Thinking, Not Writing.

I Think All Art Comes Out Of Conflict. When I Write I Am Always Looking For The Dramatic Kernel Of An Event, The Junctures Of People's Lives When They Go In One Direction, Not Another.

While There Are 'women Writers' There Are Not, And Have Never Been, 'men Writers.' This Is An Empty Category, A Class Without Specimens; For The Noun 'writer' - The Very Verb 'writing' - Always Implies Masculinity.

Not What The Mind Sees, But What The Mind Imagines The Eye Must See.

Loneliness Is Dangerous ... Because If Aloneness Does Not Lead To God, It Leads To The Devil. It Leads To The Self.

In A Sense, I May Not Consciously Know What I'm Doing. I Feel That I'm Telling A Story. I'm A Kind Of Medium By Which Something Is Transmitted.

Much In Our Lives Is Chance.

How Lawyers Make Work For One Another! You're All Priests, Worshipping The Same God. No Wonder You Adore One Another.

Early Publication Can Be A Dubious Blessing: We All Know Writers Who Would Give Anything Not To Have Published Their First Book, And Go About Trying To Buy Up All Existing Copies.

Most People Who Are Writers Go Through Periods When They Can't Write.

A Mouth Of No Distinction But Well Practiced, Before I Entered My Teens, In Irony. For What Is Irony But The Repository Of Hurt? And What Is Hurt But The Repository Of Hope?

Ultimately, We Measure Ourselves Against Our Own Ideas Of Idealism And Perfection, And We Don't Always Come Very Close To Them.

The Joyous Fulfillment Of Your Sex : The Sacred Duties Of Beloved Wife, And Helpmeet, And Mother. In Opposition To The Vulgar And Mercantile Hurly-burly Of The Great World, The Idyllic Pleasures Of The Domestic Hearth-the Which, I Firmly Believe, Make Of One Small Room An Everywhere, Indeed; And Provide Us With That Small Measure Of Bliss, Which Is, If We Are Greatly Fortunate, And Deserving, Our Lord's Promise To Us, Of The Heaven To Come.

Primarily, 'black Girl/white Girl' Is The Story Of Two Very Different, Yet Somehow 'fated' Girls; For Genna, Her 'friendship' With Minette Is The Most Haunting Of Her Life, Though It Is One-sided And Ends In Tragedy.

Betrayal Is The Deepest Wound. Betrayal Is What Remains Of Love, When Love Has Gone.

Whoever Was Stupid Was Beneath Worry Or Thought; You Did Not Have To Figure Them Out. This Eliminated Hundreds Of People. In This Life You Had Time Only For A Certain Amount Of Thinking, And There Was No Need To Waste Any Of It On People Who Were Not Threatening.

For Politics Is In Its Essence As Adams Had Said, The 'systematic Organization Of Hatred': Either You Were Organized Or You Were Not.

Just As Our Historical Beginnings Are Utterly Mysterious-why Are We Born? Why When And As We Are?-so Too Are The Beginnings Of Works Of Art And Of "artists.

Any Writer Who Has Difficulty In Writing Is Probably Not Onto His True Subject, But Wasting Time With False, Petty Goals; As Soon As You Connect With Your True Subject You Will Write.

A Writer Can't Subtract Or Excise Any Of His/her Past Because Doing So Would Erase The Work Produced During That Time.

One Of Life's Minor Satisfactions Is Forgetting.

I See The World In Ways That Might Be Considered Somewhat Harsh And Darwinistic. At The Same Time Mediated, As In Darwin, By A Real Idealism And An Excitement About The Possibilities Of The Intellect And Imagination To Deal With This Somewhat Brutal World.

Only In Love Is There Trust - Even The Possibility Of Trust.

You Are Writing For Your Contemporaries - Not For Posterity. If You Are Lucky, Your Contemporaries Will Become Posterity.

When My Brother Called To Inform Me, On The Morning Of May 22, 2003, That Our Mother Caroline Oates Had Died Suddenly Of A Stroke, It Was A Shock From Which, In A Way, I Have Yet To Recover.

For The First Time Driving That Day I Could Feel The Motion Of The Earth. The Earth Rushing Through The Emptiness Of Space. Spinning On Its Axis But They Say You Don't Feel It, You Can't Experience It. But To Feel It Is To Be Scared And Happy At Once And To Know That Nothing Matters But That You Do What You Want To Do And What You Do You Are. And I Knew I Was Moving Into The Future. There Is Not Past Anybody Can Get To, To Alter Things Or Ever To Know What Those Things Were But There Is Definitely A Future, We Are Already In It.

Food Doesn't Exist, But Can Only Be Invented. And Reinvented.

Don't Try To Anticipate An Ideal Reader - Or Any Reader. He/she Might Exist - But Is Reading Someone Else.

Cherie, Keep Walking. Shut Your Eyes. We Are Headed For The Bridge. We Are Going To Cross It.

The Art Of Reading Hardly Differs From The Art Of Writing, In That Its Most Intense Pleasures And Pains Must Remains Private, And Cannot Be Communicated To Others.

Memory Blurs, That's The Point. If Memory Didn't Blur You Wouldn't Have The Fool's Courage To Do Things Again, Again, Again, That Tear You Apart.

Adriana Loved Even The Rank Animal Smell Of The Man's Body, Her Sweat-slicked Breasts And Belly Flattened Beneath Him, And Her Arms And Legs Clutching Him As A Drowning Woman Might Clutch Another Person To Save Her Life. Don't Don't Don't Don't Leave Me. Don't Leave Me. As In Animal Copulation The Frenzy Is To Be Locked Together Not Out Of Sentiment Or Choice But Physical Compulsion. As If Bolts Of Electric Current Ran Through Both Their Bodies And Would Only Release Them From Each Other When It Ceased.

I Never Really Knew I Wanted To 'be' A Writer, But I Was Always Writing From A Very Young Age. It Became More Conscious As An Ideal When I Was In My Twenties.

Loneliness Is Like Starvation: You Don't Realize How Hungry You Are Until You Begin To Eat.

I Don't Think I'm Morbid By Nature. Serious Writers Have Always Written About Serious Subjects. Lighthearted Material Doesn't Appeal To Me, And I Don't Read It. I Think I'm A Realist, With A Realistic Sensibility Of History And The Tragedy Of History.

Serious Subjects

One Of The Qualities Of Writing That Is Not Much Stressed Is Its Problem-solving Aspect, Having To Do With The Presentation Of Material: How To Structure It, What Sort Of Sentences (direct, Elliptical, Simple Or Compound, Syntactically Elaborate), What Tone (in Art, "tone" Is Everything), Pacing. Paragraphing Is A Way Of Dramatization, As The Look Of A Poem On A Page Is Dramatic; Where To Break Lines, Where To End Sentences.

...[i Am] Utterly Entranced, At Times, With The Mere Fact That There Are Other People, And That They Experience Themselves As The Primary Center Of Consciousness Just As I Do. That Fact Alone...well, That Fact Alone Is Staggering.

I Was Writing Novels In High School And Apprenticed Myself In A Way Both To Faulkner And To Hemingway.

People Might Be Surprised To Know How Much I Throw Away. For Every Page I Publish, I Throw 10 Pages Away.

The Challenge Is To Resist Circumstances. Any Idiot Can Be Happy In A Happy Place, But Moral Courage Is Required To Be Happy In A Hellhole.

And What Is 'art'? - A Firestorm Rushing Through Time, Arising From No Visible Source And Conforming To No Principles Of Logic Or Causality.

How Does The Poet Transform His Banal Thoughts (are Not Most Thoughts Banal?) Into Such Stunning Forms, Into Beauty?

A Daydreamer Is Prepared For Most Things.

I Haven't Any Formal Schedule, But I Love To Write In The Morning, Before Breakfast. Sometimes The Writing Goes So Smoothly That I Don't Take A Break For Many Hours - And Consequently Have Breakfast At Two Or Three In The Afternoon On Good Days.

Though I Revise Constantly As I Write, I Will Usually Revise Much Of The Work Again After I've Reached The Ending.

For The Writer, The Serial Killer Is, Abstractly, An Analogue Of The Imagination's Caprices And Amorality; The Sense That, No Matter The Dictates And Even The Wishes Of The Conscious Social Self, The Life Or Will Or Purpose Of The Imagination Is Incomprehensible, Unpredictable.

Even As A Young Child, I Was A Lover Of Books And Of The Spaces In Which, As Indeed In A Sacred Temple, Books Might Safely Reside.

No, The Thing Is, We All Love Storytelling, And As A Writer You Get To Tell Stories All The Time.

My Grandmother Could Never Have Written A Memoir, So 'the Gravedigger's Daughter' Is A Homage To Her Life, And To The Lives Of Other Young Women Of Her Generation, Which Are So Rarely Articulated.

The Heavenly Light You Admire Is Fossil-light, It's The Unfathomably Distant Past You Gaze Into, Stars Long Extinct

Was It Confusing Because It Was Artistic, Or Artistic Because It Was Confusing?

As Soon As I Moved To Princeton In 1978, I Became Fascinated By Local History, Much Of It Revolutionary War-era; And I Became Fascinated By The Presidency Of Woodrow Wilson At Princeton University.

Princeton University

Of Our Hurts We Make Monuments Of Survival. If We Survive.

Great Art Is Cathartic; It Is Always Moral.

Before I Undertake A Lengthy Project, I Have Usually Given Much Thought To It Over A Period Of Years. My Files Are Filled With Likely Subjects - Which Perhaps, One Day, I Will Develop.

Our Enemy Is By Tradition Our Savior, In Preventing Us From Superficiality.

Truths Are The Last Thing You Learn About Your Family. By The Time You Learn, You're No Longer Their Child.

My Own Way Of Writing Is Very Meditated And, Despite My Reputation, Rather Slow-moving. So I Do Spend A Good Deal Of Time Contemplating Endings. The Final Ending Is Usually Arrived At Simply By Intuition.

The Written Word, Obviously, Is Very Inward, And When We're Reading, We're Thinking. It's A Sort Of Spiritual, Meditative Activity. When We're Looking At Visual Objects, I Think Our Eyes Are Obviously Directed Outward, So There's Not As Much Reflective Time. And It's The Reflectiveness And The Spiritual Inwardness About Reading That Appeals To Me.

I Really Love To Set Things In Places That Are Real To Me.

I Remember Once Asking Grandma About A Book She Was Reading, A Biography Of Abraham Lincoln, And How She Answered Me: This Was The First Conversation Of My Life That Concerned A Book, And 'the Life Of The Mind' - And Now, Such Subjects Have Become My Life.

Because The Meaning Of A Story Does Not Lie On Its Surface, Visible And Self-defining, Does Not Mean That Meaning Does Not Exist. Indeed, The Ambiguity Of Meaning, Its Inner Private Quality, May Well Be Part Of The Writer's Vision.

I've Always Been Interested In Writing About People, Including Young Children Who Are Not Able To Speak For Themselves. As In My Novel 'black Water,' I Provide A Voice For Someone Who Has Died And Can't Speak For Herself.

Criticism Is, For Me, Like Essay Writing, A Wonderful Way Of Relaxation; It Doesn't Require A Heightened And Mediated Voice, Like Prose Fiction, But Rather A Calm, Rational, Even Conversational Voice.

I Tend To Think In Dramatic Terms. In Life, There May Be An Actual Drama, But It Would Be The Fictionalized, Imagined Drama That Engaged Me.

I Was Brought Up To Be Sympathetic Toward Others.

The - The Sort Of Thing That I Want To Do Is To Strike A Resonant Chord Of Universality In Other People, Which Is Best Done By Fiction.

When I Was Very Little, Four Or Five, I Did Comic Strip Drawings, So My First Novel Had No Words. I Couldn't Write And Thought Adult Handwriting Was A Mysterious Scribble. When I Was 14, My Grandmother Gave Me A Typewriter And I Started Writing In A Different Way.

Only When You Have Completed A Novel, Or A Story, Can You Return To The Beginning And Revise Or Rewrite.

Not Even The Most Devastating Truth Can Be Told; It Must Be Evoked.

This Is My Life Now. Absurd, But Unpredictable. Not Absurd Because Unpredictable But Unpredictable Because Absurd. If I Have Lost The Meaning Of My Life, I Might Still Find Small Treasured Things Among The Spilled And Pilfered Trash.

[emily] Dickinson, Our Supreme Poet Of Inwardness.

Our House Is Made Of Glass... And Our Lives Are Made Of Glass; And There Is Nothing We Can Do To Protect Ourselves.

Be Your Own Editor/critic. Sympathetic But Merciless!

The Only People Who Claim That Money Is Not Important Are People Who Have Enough Money So That They Are Relieved Of The Ugly Burden Of Thinking About It.

My Students Often Say, "my Roommate Read This Story And Really Liked It", And It's Hard To Convince Them That There Are Things Wrong With It. I Say, "well, People Who Love You Want You To Be Happy. But I'm Your Professor And I'm Supposed To Be Teaching You Something."

There Should Really Not Be Anything Gratuitous In A Work Of Art. Sometimes What Seems As If It's Gratuitous May Be A Passage In Which A Character Is Being Characterized So That The Reader Comes To Know Him Or Her Better.

Though I Am Never Exactly "blocked" I Do Have Difficult Periods. I Am Led By A Fascination With Material - The Challenge Of Presenting It In An Original And Engaging Way. I Have No Problem Imagining Stories, Characters, Distinctive Settings & Themes - But The Difficulty Is Choosing A Voice & A Language In Which To Present It.

Trending Author

Siegfried Sassoon

Category